About the Firm

Established in 1974, by Robert E. Richards, under his holding company, R. E. Richards, Inc., the Firm began as the 25th office of Sanford Rose Associates, and was selected as SRA’s Best New Office during its first year in business. Mr. Richards opened additional regional SRA offices throughout Ohio during the mid to late 1970’s. In 1977, Mr. Richards’ eldest son, Paul Richards, joined the Firm, as a Recruiter, while still in college. Paul evolved quickly and consistently ranked among SRA’s top 10 Recruiters in the United States, winning several nation-wide SRA Top Biller Contests. Progressively, Paul began advancing the Firm’s methodologies and strategies with greater emphasis on serving clients within strategically targeted markets on a national and ultimately international basis and developing closer long term client alliances through retained search, team building, and strategic staffing. Robert Richards had served as President of SRA’s Board of Directors, Ethics Committee Chairman, and during his tenure SRA grew to over 50 offices through out the United States. Paul Richards was elected to SRA’s Board of Directors, driving advanced training and development and computerization initiatives, and then later serving as Vice President of the Board, and President of the Board of Directors, as the organization grew to 93 offices. During the early 1990’s it became apparent that Executive Directions retained search business needed to separate from SRA’s business model. Executive Directions left SRA in 1993 and afterwards created Pinnacle International to construct a unique business model, organized to provide three unique types of staffing services under one umbrella.

Executive Directions is a retained executive search firm, specializing in “team-building” and “strategic staffing”. These services enable the organization to build peak performing teams and professional departments around the executives and managers placed with clients and then invigorate those teams with strategically sought after human talent on a continuum to successfully achieve clients’ evolving goals and objectives. Executive Directions works closely with client companies to maintain a hand-on-the-pulse of clients’ staffing needs and serve as the client’s staffing advocate within the marketplace. The NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, and other competitive professional organizations are not the only ones to utilize “scouts” to identify and pull in their top talent! Executive Directions’ “Strategic Staffing” program “scouts” talent every day to give clients a competitive human capital advantage.

Pinnacle International is a contingency recruiting and professional interim company. Pinnacle International works within the same markets and clients as Executive Directions. Pinnacle’s focus is on non-executive professionals and managers in the sales, engineering, technology, quality, manufacturing, global supply chain, R & D, financial, creative, and other functional departments with clients’ organizations.

Your company’s three exempt staffing needs: 1) Executive Search, 2) Contingency Recruiting, and 3) Professional Interims, all provided by one organization, which partners with you to make your staffing problems, needs, and timely expectations, our priority.

Hiring Hook, is the custom software / tool that drives and empowers our website to be interactive with our clients and candidates and to reach out to and manage our interactive social media sites on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Hiring Hook provides our Clients with automated contact, email, and service initiation tools to quickly engage us in their staffing priorities. It also provides a quick referral mechanism for clients to place us with the right decision makers within their organization, and a Printable Over View document about Executive Directions & Pinnacle International, which can be printed and conveyed to other decision makers within their organizations. Hiring Hook allows us to create Customized Questionnaires for our clients’ searches which are sent to Candidates under consideration, using True or False, Yes or No, multiple choice, multiple select, and open-ended essay questions to help determine if a candidate is a suitable fit.

Hiring Hook empowers Candidates who visit our website to access our Job Board, apply for posted jobs, upload their resume for us to review, fill out a candidate profile, prepare for interviews, view sample “Thank You” and “Resignation” letters, and refer other Candidates to us.

Hiring Hook creates a win-win platform for Clients and Candidates to create forward momentum with us and for us to create forward momentum with them!

A Legacy of High Quality and Timely Results

Since 1974 Executive Directions (and then Pinnacle International) have achieved high quality and timely results for our client companies, who have included 32 of the Fortune 500 and dozens and dozens of small, medium, and large private and publicly owned companies.

Our Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Robert E. Richards, established the core values that guide us to this very day, which include meeting or exceeding our clients’ reasonable expectations for timely service, with high quality results through personal integrity and practice excellence. Paul E. Richards, serves as President & CEO, and has led the organization through significant evolution since joining the Firm in 1977. Over its history, the Firm has strategically evolved in breadth, depth, strength of services offered, and in geographical reach in response to an ever-expanding client base and scope of staffing needs. Throughout its history, the Firm has developed and sustained a legacy of high quality results, delivered on a timely basis.

Competition within the search industry remains high! Clearly the Firm has many top flight competitors. Nonetheless, the competitive advantage we provide to our clients is clear and measurable. While some of our largest competitors boast of their 88% 12 month “stick ratio”, we maintain a 3year “stick ratio” at 85%. While our competitors tout “only” 120 to 130 days to complete their searches, our average search is 79 days. And while interview to hire ratios vary from year to year and firm to firm, we have sustained a 2.4 to 1 interview to hire ratio over most of our history. Timely, accurate, and sustainable results reflect as much upon successful partnerships with our clients as on our highly disciplined process.